Operationally, the most important element of transparency for JSOC is not what those on the outside can see, but what those on the inside can see of each other. In fact, that’s why the Command was founded in the first place. The 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta—better known as Delta Force—had their first major hostage rescue, in Iran, end in disaster. Operation Eagle Claw was a joint mission of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators transported by U.S. Air Force MC-130 cargo planes to a secret staging area designated as Desert One, in Iran. CIA paramilitaries and Air Force combat air controllers had scouted the area. Marine helicopters from a Navy aircraft carrier were set to rendezvous at the base, but when harsh weather and mechanical failures beset the incoming helos, the mission was delayed and ultimately aborted.
The delay, however, created another problem: the idling aircraft at Desert One now required refueling. A miscommunication between an Air Force combat controller and a Marine pilot caused a helicopter to collide with a transport plane. A total of eight airmen and Marines died in the explosion. The survivors departed by MC-130 in an emergency evacuation. In addition to the loss of life, the United States suffered a crushing humiliation on the world stage, U.S. special operations forces (already generally held in poor regard by conventional military leadership) appeared second-rate at best, and the Iranians gained abandoned helicopters and the intelligence within.
Following the disaster, Colonel Charlie Beckwith would immediately press for the formation of a new kind of “joint” command that he’d long proposed, which could train for and execute special operations requiring the best of each branch of the U.S. military. The muddled chains of command, branch rivalries, varied operating procedures, and ad hoc arrangement that doomed Eagle Claw would be cleared away and reorganized into a unified force—a military within the military.8 By the end of 1980, the organization would essentially absorb the U.S. Army Delta Force and a new U.S. Navy unit called SEAL Team Six (a number inflated by its founder, SEAL Team Two commander Dick Marcinko, to alarm foreign intelligence services) and train alongside the newly minted 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), or SOAR, an elite collection of the most highly trained rotary-wing aircraft pilots in the U.S. Army.
In 1987, the organization was subordinated to a new U.S. Special Operations Command, though JSOC reported directly to the National Command Authority, meaning that its units could be tasked directly by the president and the secretary of defense. The Command existed on the fringes of military operations. If it worked in the shadows before, secretly deploying hunter-killer teams around the world to do the necessary dirty work of the White House, it would now vanish completely, but for occasional glimpses in such places as Bosnia, where it hunted war criminals, or in Panama, where it allegedly pursued Pablo Escobar.
The crucial role of JSOC units in the early phase of the campaign against terrorism (when al-Qaeda was largely concentrated in the Punjab) has been chronicled. Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda tells it best—so rich in detail, in fact, that Naylor was declared persona non grata by some JSOC commanders for revealing too much about their operations. In brief: Delta sent half of its force to Afghanistan. Major General Dell Dailey, then commander of JSOC, ordered a second task force of the less experienced DEVGRU SEALs to the region, setting off some territorial friction. Delta operated autonomously, while the SEALs operated with experienced and chagrined U.S. Army Rangers. Despite any simmering tensions, the various teams set about pursuing high-value targets without the benefit of solid intelligence and almost no technical intelligence surveillance assets. Yet many operators on the ground had spent the 1990s on the hunt in Bosnia and Kosovo and leveraged their capabilities to the fullest. In March 2002, the men killed as many as five hundred Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in the Shahi Kot Valley in Afghanistan’s Paktia province, working alongside Green Berets and U.S. Army infantrymen from the 101st Airborne Division. Early failures (such as losing Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora) were matched with successes (for example, the Delta Force capturing Saddam Hussein).
Details of later successes, such as the direct action mission that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, are still coming to light. In this baptism of fire, it is easy to imagine the remnants of problems that beset Somalia falling away—no more reliance on nonmilitary operators, no more weak intelligence, no more rivalries. JSOC’s missions in the global war on terror were taxing, but they were normal JSOC missions—reactive, shrouded in secrecy, and peripheral to the larger war effort. In Iraq, several small JSOC teams covertly infiltrated the country before the war officially began. Their goal: find and, if needed, secure chemical and biological weapons Saddam was sure to use against the allied forces. General Stanley McChrystal, the incoming commander of JSOC, would change all of that. He would set the Command on the decisive course that put a controlled pair in Osama bin Laden.
General Michael Flynn first worked with McChrystal in the Afghanistan campaign, when the former was the intelligence officer for the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps and the latter assumed command of Task Force 180. At the start of the Iraq campaign, Flynn became a senior special operations forces intelligence officer, and McChrystal was called to Washington for Joint Staff duty. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld soon appointed McChrystal to head JSOC, and a year later McChrystal asked Flynn to be his top intelligence officer.
To the extent that a man such as Flynn has martial fantasies, one has always been to integrate intelligence and fight a war in real time. In Afghanistan, early efforts at fusion teams (called Cross Functional Teams) were modestly successful but “depended on voluntary participation and their authorities were limited,” according to an influential study by National Defense University academics Christopher Lamb and Evan Munsing.9 At Bagram Airfield, the first formal Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorism Task Force helped several task forces in the early phase of the al-Qaeda conflict. Yet intelligence analysts did not sit in the same meetings as operators. Real-time access to databases was limited. Everyone understood the concept—battlefield forces needed intel—but no one really knew how to execute it. And everyone was obsessed with keeping JSOC’s secrets a secret, even at the cost of collecting and sharing actionable intelligence.
As his intelligence officer (or J-2, or “two”), Flynn operated with General McChrystal’s full authority. He leveraged his friendships with senior members of U.S. intelligence to send more analysts into the field. By force of personality, and during the course of several years, Flynn convinced officials everywhere from the State Department to the Internal Revenue Service to staff the experimental new interagency fusion teams he was developing. He crossed Iraq, trying to better integrate JSOC’s mission (which mostly involved hunting high-value targets) with other special operation forces and conventional units. (Before Flynn’s efforts began, when JSOC conducted a combat mission, the battlespace would be cleared of conventional forces lest anyone disturb the secrecy of a black operation.) Flynn discovered that most intelligence and interrogation reports collected by JSOC units were stamped ORCON, meaning, “originator controlled,” which effectively precluded anyone else—even the CIA—from seeing them. He wondered how often conventional forces missed an opportunity to capture or kill a bad guy because they couldn’t gain access to JSOC task force intelligence. Flynn issued an order that JSOC information should be classified only at the Secret level, bringing tens of thousands of intelligence analysts around the world into the fold.
McChrystal and Flynn slowly coaxed the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency back into JSOC interrogations and insisted to the agencies that he would deal with abuse complaints directly. McChrystal even charmed the CIA, bringing its main special operations liaison into his secure video conference calls (but he instructed the man to never, ever tell his superiors at Langley untruths about what JSOC was up to). McChrystal was famously enthusiastic for videoconferencing, using the technology to “gather” officers, operators, ambassadors, poli
ticians, and members of the intelligence community around the world in the same room to resolve issues and design strategy. In fact, his unit spent more than $100,000 on video teleconferencing bandwidth during the early stages of the counterinsurgency operation in Iraq. (As his counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa increased, he likewise coordinated regular videoconferences between CIA station chiefs, U.S. ambassadors, and policymakers in Washington.)10
If it surprises you that it took years for the CIA—which is tasked with gathering intelligence on terrorists—to establish a regular, senior-level presence in daily conference calls with the military units tasked with killing terrorists, you can begin to sense the frustration that fed Flynn’s and McChrystal’s determination to set things right.
Changing the culture of a mysterious organization such as JSOC is hard, and it took more than three years before Flynn and McChrystal could create the real-time, flattened battlefield that allowed coalition troops to significantly reduce violence in Iraq. General Doug Brown of Special Operations Command eventually pulled in more than a hundred liaison officers from agencies and entities across the government, telling them that they were expected to be part of the team, not just note takers at briefings.
McChrystal and Flynn came to realize around the same time that JSOC’s operational tempo could be rapidly stepped up by introducing radical decentralization and radical transparency into an organization that had always been centralized and extraordinarily discreet. Flynn once told one of McChrystal’s deputies that his “A-ha” moment came when he saw that the key to actually doing tactical military intelligence right was as simple as making sure that everyone had access to everything.11
At another moment in history, with any other unit, these insights might not have produced even a ripple of change, much less a wave. Yet JSOC was special and feared, and the bureaucracy paid extra attention to it. McChrystal was uniquely suited for the challenge—humble and exacting, capable of incorporating into his inner circle personalities (such as Flynn’s) that were the opposite of his own.
And there was urgency. Nothing but JSOC’s networked warfare was working—not the CIA’s operations, not whatever the National Counterterrorism Center thought it was, not outsourcing intelligence to liaison organizations. JSOC’s success begat success. Iraq was a horrible place to be as JSOC’s operational strategy gelled. Sometimes, Iraqi police would have to cart fifty dead bodies a day to the morgue in Baghdad alone. Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the commanding general of the Multi-National Force in Iraq at the beginning of the McChrystal era and then, in his second tour, as the usher of President George W. Bush’s surge, had a slightly more measured view of JSOC’s success; he knew how much his conventional forces were contributing to missions that JSOC was supplementing, and he was not above pulling rank to refuse to authorize a JSOC mission when he felt it would compromise another strategic goal. Yet he deeply respected McChrystal for his strategic vision. Likewise, McChrystal saw in Petraeus the model of a warrior-intellectual that he aspired to be. The two men got along well; had their relationship not developed, it would have been disastrous to the mission.12 During his brief tenure as director of the CIA, Petraus was on better terms with special missions unit commanders than any of his predecessors ever were, because they served under him just before his appointment.
McRaven was equally instrumental in the changes afoot at JSOC. The former SEAL Team Six member and SEAL Team Four commander had just spent eighteen months as a director on the NSC. He’d been itching to get back to the combat zone during his tenure at the NSC, but his time at the top of the chain proved useful. He now knew the bureaucracy in ways that McChrystal and Flynn did not, and he knew its trigger points. McRaven was given command of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force–Arabian Peninsula, which oversaw all JSOC operations in Iraq. He had a direct line to the White House through his former boss, Michele Malvesti, the senior NSC director for combating terrorism. (They shared adjoining desks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.)
After mending old wounds and reorganizing the bureaucracy, the three men turned their guns to the doctrine itself. Flynn and McChrystal wanted to operationalize what Flynn calls “network-centered warfare,” a PowerPoint term that conceals as much as it reveals. With Malvesti’s help, they developed a new model of using intelligence to aid combat against terrorists and insurgents. Technology now allowed (at least, in theory) for the reduction of blinks between collecting and exploiting a piece of intelligence. The model went by the initials FFFEAD, or F3EAD—find, fix, finish (that is, the getting of the bad guys), exploit, analyze, and disseminate (that is, using the first get to get other bad guys). The “finish” of F3EAD—the kill—is certainly the most dangerous part of any operation. “But exploitation is where you truly made your money and enabled you to go after a network, [as opposed to] a single target, once we all embraced F3EAD, which was relatively quickly,” said a U.S. Army Ranger who served in Iraq. “This was the strength of McChrystal and Flynn. They believed in the process and then set out to resource it.”
As simple and intuitive as it sounds, F3EAD was terrifically difficult to actually do. Most soldiers—even the elite special operations forces—were trained on a much less elegant model that privileged firepower and hardware over thinking and strategizing. For Flynn, the key word in the model is “disseminate.” Information, he told one colleague, “was fucking less than worthless” if it couldn’t be widely distributed. This meant that JSOC’s culture had to change. It had more fully embraced bleeding-edge battlefield computing technologies than any command in military history. The next round of successes would require using those tools, and tools not yet invented, to show the Army and the world what war in the twenty-first century looked like.
∗Military and civilian employees who get unfettered access to the president (or to the National Command Authority) must undergo a rigorous background check conducted by the Defense Security Service or the FBI. Once they pass, they are read in to a special access program called “Yankee White,” which grants them unfettered access to presidential workspaces that might contain classified information at any level. Military personnel—Air Force pilots, Navy stewards, Marine engineers, say—are rated according to a system that either permits or denies them access to a loaded weapon when the president is around.
∗Aside from physical security, nuclear war plans themselves are still among the secrets that are given the highest degree of physical protection. The most secret of these plans is the list of Desired Ground Zeroes, or DGZ, that combatant commands and the U.S. Strategic Command regularly collaborate on and revise.
Notes
1. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Affairs Handbook, vol. 5, handbook 3, p. 1, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/89254.pdf.
2. Barack Obama, Executive Order 13526, 2009.
3. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 73.
4. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down (New York: Signet, 2002), 33–34.
5. Based on correspondence with Colonel Guidry.
6. Chris Monty, “SEAL Commander Told to ‘Get the Hell Out’ of the Media,” Blippitt, February 8, 2012, http://www.blippitt.com/seal-commander-told-to-get-the-hell-out-of-the-media-video/.
7. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.
8. Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox, Delta Force: The Army’s Elite Counterterrorist Unit (New York: Avon, 2000), 331.
9. Christopher J. Lamb and Evan Munsing, Secret Weapon: High-Value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 2011), 11.
10. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 223, iPad edition; Sean D. Naylor, “Years of Detective Work Led to Al-Qaeda Target,” Army Times, November 21, 2011.
11. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.
12. From the author’s brief interview with Richard Holbrooke, the
special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, shortly before his death.
CHAPTER 11
The Tools for the Job
On November 3, 2002, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force launched a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone that had been following Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a coplanner of the plot to bomb the USS Cole in Yemen in 1998. On the ground, tracking the convoy from a distance using lasers and other technology, were U.S. military personnel who had been given civilian cover by the State Department. This was to be what the CIA would later call a noncovert but deniable mission. The United States would kill al-Harethi, the Yemeni government would duly protest, the United States would deny involvement, and both countries’ objectives would be satisfied.
The drone strike was successful. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, subsequently confirmed that the United States had indeed developed an assassination-by-drone capability—and a “very successful” one at that.1 (He elided mention of an internal debate within the National Security Council about whether al-Harethi should be snatched up by a U.S. Joint Special Operations Command [JSOC] team for interrogation.) Not only did Wolfowitz’s braggadocio resonate poorly around the world (the strike was condemned at the United Nations), but it also soured the fragile relationship between the United States and Yemen—precisely the type of relationship that allowed the United States to conduct a secret counterterrorism campaign inside the country in the first place. A Yemeni general later complained that Americans have no regard for “the internal circumstances in Yemen.”2
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